“I am Egypt,” proclaims Yul Brynner, leonine as Ramses the Great in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Cinematic pomp aside, so many monumental and dazzling artifacts survive the reign of the real Ramses II that they fill a dozen rooms and multi-media spectacles in “Ramses the Great and the Gold of the Pharaohs,” opening today at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco.
It’s been exactly a century since the tomb of King Tutankhamen was found and plundered, and the relics in the most recent touring Tutankhamen exhibition—currently in Brussels through October 31—will soon be housed permanently in the new Grand Egyptian Museum, located near Cairo. “Although Tutankhamen is known for important reforms during his short life,” says Renée Dreyfus, curator of ancient art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the organization that oversees the de Young as well as the Legion of Honor), “his tomb would have been larger and included far more treasures had he not died so young.”
